


Colors, Unseen

by HoneyCorvid



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Consentacles, Enthusiastic Consent, Monsterfucking, Other, PWP, Tentacles, in a sexy way, listen basically i just want helen distortion to rail me because i’m a big stupid lesbian, non-specific genitalia; can be interpreted as anything, reality warping and the distortion’s hallways but like
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-10
Updated: 2020-05-10
Packaged: 2021-03-02 23:34:37
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,150
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24105253
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HoneyCorvid/pseuds/HoneyCorvid
Summary: This is a bad idea.Specifically, this is you opening the door to the distortion for no real reason beyond “man that spooky real estate agent sure is sexy, huh,” and having a blast getting your fragile sense of reality just absolutely decimated.
Relationships: Helen Richardson (The Magnus Archives)/Original Character(s), Helen | The Distortion (The Magnus Archives)/Original Character(s)
Comments: 10
Kudos: 78





	Colors, Unseen

**Author's Note:**

> So i uh, i did this. of course this is my first fic for this fandom. obviously. couldn’t be having a fandom without my tentacle brand front and center huh
> 
> note: this is a) nowhere near as physically explicit as my other stuff but b) weird and existential and verging on nonsense poetry. nobody actually gets hurt in this fic and the narrator wakes up fine at home.

This is a bad idea.

This is a  _ really  _ bad idea, of that you are certain; none of the choices you’ve made that led you here were exactly smart ones, and as your hand hovers above the handle to the nondescript yellow door that absolutely should not be on the exterior wall of your bedroom, it strikes you that the choice you’re making right now could potentially be the least smart decision you’ve made in your life.

You turn the handle. The door opens with a slow creak that doesn’t match its spotless appearance at all, and you’re faced with a long hall, the swirling patterns on the walls a color you could almost name. For a moment you think it’s empty, then you see her out of the corner of your eye, and then quite suddenly she’s reflected in every mirror and painting along the hall, and you are suddenly and acutely aware of all of your neurons in a way you wish you weren’t.

“You made it!” Helen crows, and you’re not sure when she managed to get immediately in front of you but you manage a weak nod anyway because, shit, you  _ sure did make it.  _ Her instructions —  _ just open the door when you find it!!  _ — were spot-on. You’d laughed, when she said it, and asked what would happen if you didn’t find it, and  _ she  _ had laughed without answering.

You suppose  _ it  _ found  _ you, _ more accurately, but one way or another you’re here now. Helen gives you a smile that’s halfway between predatory and pitying, patting your shoulder with a hand that is impossible to map in your mind when you shut your eyes. It’s heavy and sharp and  _ wrong,  _ but of course that was one of the few things you knew already when you opened the door. It probably says something about you that there’s a thrum of excitement twisted in with the fear, thinking about those long, pointed fingers and how they feel against your back.

“Just breathe, dear,” she tells you. Her voice is slightly kinder when she says it than it’s been before, and it sounds almost like she’s empathizing with you. “I know these halls can be… a lot to take in.”

You curl your toes in the soft black rug and nod, taking deep breaths; each one fills your lungs with air that tastes the same way your disbelieving laughter did when you and your cousin had managed to get helplessly lost driving home from school as teens, the breathless flavor of realizing that you’ve never even  _ seen  _ this part of town before.

You open your eyes. The walls aren’t the color you remember; neither is the floor. It’s fine, though, and you smile shakily at Helen, who positively  _ beams  _ at you.

“Better?”

You nod again, not trusting your voice, and her smile grows wider. Smiles shouldn’t go that wide. You’re pretty sure people don’t have that many teeth. You grin back at her with your pitifully fathomable human mouth, and it seems like that’s plenty for her. One of her hands wraps around yours, heavy and unyielding, and the other pulls open a door that was definitely not there when you shut your eyes.

Helen leads you through, and for a moment what’s beyond is the same hallway you were just in, but when you blink you realize it’s actually a comfortable bedroom, probably. There’s definitely a bed, and it’s probably a room, and everything in here, this strange, distorted world, is comfortable unless you think about it too long.

Helen gestures at the bed, her voice multi-layered and strange when she sing-songs “ _ shall we, then,”  _ and your heart pounds out a twisting rhythm as you follow her lead.

  
  
  


You met Helen a few days ago. You’d been bored out of your mind in a café, trying in vain to pay attention to a “modern classic” by some dickhead who can’t write women to save his life when you saw her, stunning and unfathomable, reflected strange and wrong and thrilling in the frosted glass of the window beside you. When you turned, startled, you’d only seen a smiling woman in an iridescent button-down leaning against the bar, her eyes (a color you couldn’t make out across the shop, and you’re still not sure of now, even as you stare at them) fixed on you. In that moment you felt very much like  _ prey,  _ which you thought at the time was silly! She reminded you of your  _ cool _ English Lit teachers! Why would she be  _ scary? _

(Again,  _ now, _ as her heavy hand presses against your entire torso to push you back into the pillows covering her bed, you’re more comprehending of why you should be afraid. But you’re not, not the way you should be. Certainly you’re  _ somewhat  _ terrified, but it’s the  _ good  _ kind, the kind that tastes like sugar and electricity on your tongue.) 

You’re still not sure why you wandered over to her, but you’d found yourself drifting across the artfully worn wooden floor to stand across from her, no plan in your head for what to say once you made it there. 

Luckily you didn’t seem to need one, since she’d just grinned at you all wide but human and introduced herself as Helen Richardson,  _ so  _ nice to meet you, and it was about all you could do to babble out a response that was hopefully your name and some kind of pleasantry. 

Your memory of that interaction is hazy and strange, recollected moments spiraling out in fractals of unimportant detail; from her face to her hair to the way one small part curled around and around itself, the rich brown catching your eye in a way that read as rainbows anyway. 

She’d asked if you saw her in the window, and you told her yes, and she’d smiled and smiled and  _ smiled,  _ lips and teeth and crinkles around her eyes trapping you and pulling you in, and then she asked if you wanted to see the whole and truth of her, and there had been no hesitation in your voice at all when you said  _ yes,  _ breathless and certain. 

You know she asked you some questions, vague but leading and enough; you know none of her proposals inspired anything close to a hard no from you, most in fact emphatic agreement; you know you’re here, now, and lucid even as the world around you is anything but; you know that although her hands are heavy and sharp and wrong her lips are just as soft and warm as any other kiss, and that’s all you need in this moment. 

The world spins. That’s usually a turn of phrase, but you’re fairly certain that in this case it’s as close to a description of what’s happening as you can get. Terror and excitement are thrumming through you, turning your body into a live circuit, and you let yourself fall headfirst into the impossibility of the situation you’re in. Something is winding itself around you, twisting around your arms until they’re held comfortable but firm above your head. Your eyes open, and you’re aware quite suddenly that the twisting, swirling patterns on the walls and comforter are awake now, technicolor tendrils wrapping around your limbs in a way that’s almost startlingly gentle. 

She stares down at you, the vibrant not-colors of her eyes brilliant and focused, a soft smile playing on her lips. The tendrils holding you are part of her, you’re certain, but you see no points where they connect; she is whole and strange and perfect, and every point of contact and sight you see is her and her and  _ her,  _ curling hair and twisting hands and soft once-human skin as much as the almost-cotton of the duvet below you, the not-paper of the walls; you are  _ held _ and you are  _ felt _ and you are  _ consumed,  _ the fear and exhilaration that has become all of you making her shine brighter before your eyes, giving her power room to grow and twist and  _ hold  _ you, all to draw it out and out; your breaths are deep and fast, now, her heavy hands dry and warm against the skin where her fingers have neatly sliced away your shirt; she leans in to kiss you again and you are nothing but the adrenaline in your veins and you are everything you’ve ever been and more and you are just those points of perfect contact; you yield entirely to her hold, your sigh shaky and terrified but blissful all the same, and she smiles and laughs her triplicated laugh and tells you that that’s  _ very good.  _

There is no part of you at all that cares at this point that you’re never going to salvage this outfit. It’s dust in the wind, frankly, and if one set of boring-casual day clothes are the price of whatever the hell is happening to you right now it’s one you’re happy to pay. You shudder when the tentacles that were pretending to be a bed at your approach give up the ruse entirely and focus instead on dragging every shuddering sound from you they can, which they are very good at indeed; you were lucid before but you’re  _ not now,  _ and you can’t help the way your voice trembles as you cry out into a place where there has only ever been one person to hear you. 

She kisses that building wail off your lips, her voice coming from all around you now in dizzying waves of incomprehensible praise and gentle teasing, and when you break apart so you can breathe your exhalation is a gasped request to do  _ anything  _ for  _ her. _

“You’re doing wonderfully as it is,” she tells you, and her laughter is a balm even as it shakes and skewers you. The bulk of what she says next is lost to you as the swirling bands of something-that-is-nothing around your legs twist and shift and make you  _ scream,  _ but you can kind of catch it when she muses, infuriatingly calm and endearingly cheerful, that this is  _ also  _ quite an entertaining way to take a meal. 

You wonder briefly if she’s going to end this rendezvous by  _ eating _ you, and think that you would be disappointed but not surprised or even all that mad about it. It seems like it’s kind of what she’s meant to do? But you’re also aware, on a vague but real level, that she won’t.  _ This,  _ this snaking shifting thing that has reminded you there are an infinite infinity of colors that the rods and cones in your fragile human eyes cannot begin to comprehend, is the meal she means, and yours is a role in it you are happy to serve. You pull against your restraints for the first time, suddenly hungry to kiss her again, and she laughs and laughs and  _ laughs  _ even as she indulges you in this as in so many things.

  
  
  


You wake up in your bed not long after sunrise, the tatters of your shirt still sticking to your back. Your pants you assume were a lost cause, and you don’t mourn them; frankly, you’re only glad to keep the sad remnants of your  _ shirt  _ because otherwise you’re fairly certain you’d think someone drugged you on the way home and you had the wildest sex dream of your life once you collapsed into bed. 

But no. All the tears in the shirt are neatly spiraling, save the efficient split down the front; looking at it almost makes you dizzy even though you’re quite sure it’s still the same cotton blend it had been when you pulled it on yesterday. You pull it off, wondering if you should throw it out? Keep it as a memento? If you wash the sweat out of it, will it lose the faint sheen of impossible color it’s taken on?

You put it aside, for now, thinking vague thoughts about taking a shower and going back to bed. You’re standing up to do exactly that, in fact, when a small paper flower falls out of your hair, landing with a soft, strangely musical sound against your sheets. It’s one single twisted piece, made up of those colors that remind you that there are shrimp out there who can see a whole universe we as humans can’t; written on its petals in a neat but twisty cursive hand are simply the words  _ Thank you!! -H.  _ She used a gold pen, you’re fairly sure; in fact, you think she might have used the gold pen you absently left on your nightstand a few days ago after writing a card to a friend of a friend for his birthday.

It’s so neat and polite, such an absolutely ridiculous thing to receive after a one-night stand with a monster, that there’s really not much you can do but flop gracelessly back down onto your bed and laugh yourself breathless. 

**Author's Note:**

> i’m honeycorvid on twitter come talk to me about how being a terrifying bighanded fear monster is actually very cool and sexy if you think about it


End file.
